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While language competition models of diachronic language shift are increasingly sophisticated, drawing on sociolinguistic components like variable language prestige, distance from language centers and intermediate bilingual transitionary…

The socioeconomic status of people depends on a combination of individual characteristics and environmental variables, thus its inference from online behavioral data is a difficult task. Attributes like user semantics in communication,…

Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user…

Cultural diversity encoded within languages of the world is at risk, as many languages have become endangered in the last decades in a context of growing globalization. To preserve this diversity, it is first necessary to understand what…

Social media provide access to behavioural data at an unprecedented scale and granularity. However, using these data to understand phenomena in a broader population is difficult due to their non-representativeness and the bias of…

Socioeconomic bias in society exacerbates disparities, influencing access to opportunities and resources based on individuals' economic and social backgrounds. This pervasive issue perpetuates systemic inequalities, hindering the pursuit of…

This paper evaluates global-scale dialect identification for 14 national varieties of English as a means for studying syntactic variation. The paper makes three main contributions: (i) introducing data-driven language mapping as a method…

This study leverages large-scale travel surveys for over 200,000 residents across Boston, Chicago, Hong Kong, London, and Sao Paulo. With rich individual-level data, we make systematic comparisons and reveal patterns in social mixing, which…

While language is a complex adaptive system, most work on syntactic variation observes a few individual constructions in isolation from the rest of the grammar. This means that the grammar, a network which connects thousands of structures…

Consumption practices are determined by a combination of economic, social, and cultural forces. We posit that lower economic constraints leave more room to diversify consumption along cultural and social aspects in the form of omnivorous or…

Human biases are ubiquitous but not uniform: disparities exist across linguistic, cultural, and societal borders. As large amounts of recent literature suggest, language models (LMs) trained on human data can reflect and often amplify the…

In the last few years, microblogging platforms such as Twitter have given rise to a deluge of textual data that can be used for the analysis of informal communication between millions of individuals. In this work, we propose an…

We conduct a detailed investigation of correlations between real-time expressions of individuals made across the United States and a wide range of emotional, geographic, demographic, and health characteristics. We do so by combining (1) a…

The prevalence of social media presents a growing opportunity to collect and analyse examples of English varieties. Whilst usage of these varieties was - and, in many cases, still is - used only in spoken contexts or hard-to-access private…

We present a study of the relationship between gender, linguistic style, and social networks, using a novel corpus of 14,000 Twitter users. Prior quantitative work on gender often treats this social variable as a female/male binary; we…

Given the centrality of regions in social movements, politics and public administration we aim to quantitatively study inter- and intra-regional communication for the first time. This work uses social media posts to first identify…

While a large body of work inspects language models for biases concerning gender, race, occupation and religion, biases of geographical nature are relatively less explored. Some recent studies benchmark the degree to which large language…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in simulating human behaviour and social intelligence. However, they risk perpetuating societal biases, especially when demographic information is involved. We introduce…

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have made them a popular information-seeking tool among end users. However, the statistical training methods for LLMs have raised concerns about their representation of under-represented…

Statistical linguistics has advanced considerably in recent decades as data has become available. This has allowed researchers to study how statistical properties of languages change over time. In this work, we use data from Twitter to…